May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers

by Minelle Mahtani

For readers of Crying in H Mart and In the Dream House, a searing, intimate and blisteringly honest memoir about mothers and daughters, grief and healing, and finding your voice.

Minelle Mahtani had taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she'd moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.

Just as Minelle was finding her voice, her mother was losing hers.

What does it mean to amplify the voices of others while the stories of your ancestors are being buried in your mother's mouth? Why do we cling to superstition and luck when we’ve lost all faith in healing those we love? And how do we juggle bearing the burden of looking after an ill parent when we are trying to parent our own children?

In exquisitely lyrical and inventive prose, Mahtani recounts the experience so many of us a life calibrated through calculating when to speak and when to be silent in a world that feels like it forces us to be broken.

Genres: Nonfiction, Grief, Canada, Biography, Audiobook

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2024

Reviews

[Molly Klassen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember listening to Dr. Mahtani read out part of an early draft of this book in her GRSJ 101 class back in 2019. She is the most inspiring, lovely professor I have ever had—and she was so kind and encouraging when it came to my writing.

Pleased to say this book is similarly wonderful. Dr. Mahtani simply has a way of telling stories that is so beautiful!!!

[Ayelet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved, loved, loved this book. What a beautiful tribute to Mahtani's ancestors and specifically to her mother. I teared up a couple of times while reading. This is a beautiful, thoughtful, quiet meditation on grief, voice, and asking questions. And the recipe at the end was a perfect note to end on.

[Katie H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetically written. Beautiful

[Sia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Sharing her journey helped me with mine, as my mom has lost her voice. She penned the feelings I have bottled up inside. Thank you Minelle.

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkable journey through time and place. Asking good questions

[Enid Wray · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brutally honest interrogation of grief and race all wrapped up in the mother-daughter relationship.

And that she is both a journalist and a geographer and views the world through a geographer’s lens, well, that’s just the icing on the cake and what helps her find and define her own “Sense of Place.”

Highly recommended.

[Jennifer Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

May It Have A Happy Ending is an insightful and reflective book that weaves together themes including family relationships, how we show up in the world, and what it means to be human. As a friend and colleague of the author, I dove into the book familiar with the insight, nuance, and heart that Mahtani brings to whatever she is doing. Mahtani’s writing is astute, humorous, and at just the right moments ironic. She is forthcoming and vulnerable in this book, and walks the reader through the grace and complexities of her own relationships, first of all with her mother, and then with a range of friends, family, and colleagues. Her willingness to lay bare her internal experience deepens the reader’s understanding of her central themes. This willingness also exposes the fault lines and doubts that are fundamental to our day-to-day existence, even as we often want to erase them from our view.

As the book cover states, this is a reflection of the author finding her “voice as her mother was losing hers,” due to a diagnosis of throat cancer. As Mahtani relocates from Toronto to Vancouver and lands an exciting opportunity as the host of a radio show, she finds herself reckoning with the many layers of her relationship with her mother and other family members and friends. She is also encountering challenges at work, many of these emerging out of the whiteness typically found in many newsrooms. Mahtani opens many doors to the reader–to doubts, questions, surprise, frustration, weariness, and more. We are invited into the author’s struggles and successes.

It is the careful integration of nuance and frankness, directness and subtlety, that gives the book its expansiveness and depth. Many questions are raised, some with answers, and others without. This is a book more about ambivalence than resolution. Yet it is a generous ambivalence: Mahtani reminds us, over and over, that it is okay to live with the questions and to accept contradictions. It is in offering up her own questions and contradictions that she reminds us that we can also live with our own.

[Ninan Abraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this memoir is like a gift of warm, intimate revelations into a life well-lived, despite all the upheaval, trauma, loss and grief. Each vignette offered up by Minelle Mahtani invites you in. Each brings you a whole new appreciation for what a smart, talented, gifted interviewer she clearly is, while deftly reversing the role into the teller of stories. And what stories! The love between mother and daughter. The desperate urgency of looking for any avenue towards restoring her mother's health out of bleak prognoses. The shock of recognition of anxieties manifest in compulsive counting of ordinary things to extraordinary lengths. The daily grind of indignities women of colour face matter of factly from professional colleagues to partners. The uplift of a lesson from Salman Rushdie on the acts of repair from wounds we carry. Most beautifully, the messages from her late mother, revealing themselves over time, including the phrase that lends itself to the title. I just discovered, nestled in my store bought copy, a real feather! There's a chapter on it- read the book- the grace and care that underpin the stories have a way of enveloping the reader.

[Sylvia Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. It’s tender, it’s funny, it’s a ridiculously good read. For anyone who has lived through a parent’s illness and death, shifted careers, found a new love, it will resonate. Mahtani's story is specific, of course, but it's also universal - there is so much about her experience that speaks to what most of us go through, in varying ways, through the course of our lives. I think anyone could find touch-points. But I'm not telling you to read it because it's a balm for the soul (although it is - this is the book I wish I had when I lost my Dad), but because it's a great read. The writing is gorgeous, the stories are engrossing, and the structure is smart - non-linear in a way that makes sense, echoing the way grief itself is experienced. Regardless of who you are and what you've experienced in your own life, you’ll want to hang out with Mahtani in the pages. It's great. Get it. Read it!

[Rema · Rating 5 out of 5]

This lyrical, touching memoir is such a moving read. It is beautifully framed, written by a woman - who is also a mother herself - to her own mother. Gracefully weaving together stories that allude to the author's Iranian and Indian heritage, chapters like "Once upon a time" and "Forty days", provide allegorical glimpses into some of the lived experiences of mixed-race people, within a Canadian context. This memoir truly paints a nuanced picture of the complicated, and often transcendental nature, of mother-daughter relationships. To that end, while reading "The orange folder", goosebumps raced down my arms.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving memoir by former Canadian radio host and journalist about growing up in Iranian and Indian in Canada, her parents divorce, motherhood challenges, the complicated relationship she had with her mother and her grief when her mother dies from tongue cancer. Minelle also talks a lot about her career as a radio host and how debilitating her counting number compulsions (a form of OCD) came to be particularly after her mother's death. Great on audio narrated by the author herself and highly recommended for fans of books like Older sister, not necessarily related, My mother's daughter Listen to the squawking chicken and Crying in H Mart.

[Naeemah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Mahtani is as eloquent as ever in this book. It is a deeply emotional telling of her life and I found myself pausing at times to reflect on how her thoughts applied to my own life. I was moved at the end when she acknowledged so many of her students. It's astounding to me that someone as accomplished as Dr. Mahtani put into words a lot of the same imposter syndrome that so many people deal with. Cannot recommend this book enough, especially the audiobook so you can appreciate Dr. Mahtani's radio ready voice!

[Siobhan Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had a lot happening, but for the most part, it was well-balanced. I wasn't familiar with Mahtani before this, but not knowing her didn't impact my enjoyment. I appreciated how she balanced the different stories in the book: her radio show, her life as a person of colour in a predominantly white field, her mother's cancer battle, etc. Sometimes when authors write memoirs in which they're covering a lot of topics, things feel disconnected, but Mahtani didn't do that. Things flowed well and made sense.

[Vaishnavi Panch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book moved me in ways I cannot even explain. What an absolutely refreshing and resplendent meditation on relationships, love, grief, and healing. As someone who has faced the loss of a close loved one and did not know how to grieve, reading this book was a profoundly visceral experience. The words danced their way off the page and into the deepest parts of my heart. My copy is already tear and coffee stained- and I am not sorry about it.

[Meharoona · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very powerful book. I loved how the author captured so much meaning throughout the book. I found the use of symbolism and spirituality very powerful. I was incredibly moved by the connection with with Surah Yasin which left me in tears remember the passing of my own parent. From a craft point of view, I found the use of fragmented vignettes very compelling and done so well. I highy recommend this beautiful book. Thank you for sharing your story.

[Rom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just love Minelle, she is a beautiful, genuine, and deeply inspiring human. I had the immense pleasure of being one of her students, and can attest to her unique way with words, of weaving meaning, justice, nuance. Thank you for sharing your and your family’s story!

[Lauren Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful interweaving of stories and a magnificent meditation on relationality, questions, and grief.

[Beth Oehler · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was about very poignant themes but didn’t connect with this particular style.

[Lynn B · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just did not connect with this style writing.
I was interested in the subject matter but the style just did not work for me.

[Marisa (Mirroredpages) · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 31%

Listened to audiobook

[Stephanie H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in a way that I’m growing to really appreciate from memoirs: short chapters! I don’t think I’m at a point in my life where this book is meant for me, however. I think it’s something I could return to later when it will have more meaning. For now, I struggled to spend more than a few minutes at a time feeling invested in this story.